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3/24/09

We'll Let You Go If You Lie About Torture, Okay?

This is from Jonathan Turley. He was on Rachel Maddow's show last night talking about this and the Obama/Cheney exchange. His take on the Obama/Cheney thing caught me by surprise; I thought Obama smacked Cheney down. Turley thinks Obama, by even having this dialogue with Cheney, is perpetuating the slide toward changing history instead of vindicating it with war crimes trials. You need to watch the Maddow clip, he is impassioned about it, and you should be too! (in the first graf of Turley's post).

Two British High Court judges have released a very disturbing decision that finds that ormer detainee Binyam Mohamed was offered his freedom by the United States in exchange for his promise not to reveal his own torture at Guantanamo Bay. Equally disturbing is the statement from the English government that it cannot release proof of the torture because of objections from the United States government. If the Obama Administration is continuing this position, it is not only blocking prosecution of war crimes but the release of evidence of such war crimes to other nations. I discussed this and other developments on this segment of Rachel Maddow’s show.

Mohamed is an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager and was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claims he was tortured Pakistan and in Morocco. He was then transferred to the United States, which also tortured him.

All charges against him were dropped last year. He refused our Faustian bargain.

Lord Justice John Thomas and Mr. Justice David Lloyd Jones said that there was evidence to show Mohamed was tortured, but that the documents could not be made public because of the objections by the United States. Presumably, if the Obama Administration lifted such objections publicly, the British government would not have a basis to withhold the material.